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As an institution, it seems that it really does not like that my cousin Phil Lord and his partner Chris Miller keep making movies that push back against the beliefs that the audience is dumb and...

Brad DeLong

Mar 28

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As an institution, it seems that it really does not like that my cousin Phil Lord and his partner Chris Miller keep making movies that push back against the beliefs that the audience is dumb and the world is doomed. The Project Hail Mary looks like a space opera, but its real subject is the politics of competence. Lord and Miller and Gosling are smuggling an argument about process, improvisation, and friendship into the Hollywood-&-media IP-industrial complex…

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A nice interview <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/movies/project-hail-mary-phil-lord-christopher-miller.html> of my cousin Phil Lord and his partner Chris Miller about the extraordinarily good and successful Project Hail Mary movie, on which they are team leads!

Some highlights:

“We’re not particularly strategic from a Hollywood business standpoint. Our strategy is to make things as good as we can, and then pray…”
“You have to figure it all out in advance and plan and plan and plan. And then you want to give a playground for [Gosling and others] to figure out something new…”
“Hopefully the audience comes out and they feel a little more capable, in part because… [of] the choice that [the character Rylan Grance] was only going to be good at one thing, and… bad at everything else… at space, he’s afraid constantly. Clumsy. And he has social anxiety. But he’s really good at microbiology…”
“The things that are daunting about the book… dense science experiments… first person… rock alien with no face who speaks a musical language—those things all seemed exciting to us…”
“We wanted to lean into all the things that were hard…”
“We… come from animation, so we understand that something with no face can still express itself through movement…
“It was almost contrarian to make a movie that’s so affirming…. What I love about Andy [Weir]’s book and what we’ve always tried to do in our work is not just present problems but try to suggest solutions. This movie is suggesting that we are capable…”
“[On the set of Solo] we met Neal Scanlan and the creature shop team that we worked with to make Rocky…..We had such a great experience with them, making these aliens and robots together. That experience made us very confident that we could get a lot of Rocky’s performance through puppetry…. Sound department, costume department all came from the Solo crew…”
“We introduced a crew screening Sunday, and I was surprised because half the people were “Spider-Verse” crew members that had doubled up…”
“We had talked to NASA people about what it was like in zero G the first time, and they’re like, ‘It’s messy. You bonk into stuff, you’re awkward. You want to throw up. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ So, we let Ryan use his creativity and his comedic timing to bonk into everything and find his way…”
“We’re both high anxiety. But we were just as high anxiety making Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Nobody puts more pressure on us than ourselves. We came on this movie when it was a manuscript, before it became an international best seller with rabid fans around the globe. And even back then, we’re like, ‘We have to do justice to this story because it’s a beautiful story’…”

The movie at $140 million has (what I am informed is) tied with Oppenheimer as the largest nominal non-sequwe non-franchise movie opening weekend ever. The movie looks to have only a -35% dropoff from weekend 1 to weekend 2 (for blockbusters and front-loaded fanboy titles, a -60% dropoff is routine, a -50% dropoff is strong, and a -40% dropoff exceptionally good, or so I am told). The movie that has a 95%-favorable critic and a 96%-favorable audience rating on <http://rottentomatoes.com>:

It is so favorable a take that I would call it a full-fledged beat sweetener, except for one thing, two things actually: the article’s title and subtitle. It’s not “Chris Miller and Phil Lord Direct Ryan Gosling in the Closest Thing to a One-Man Show Blockbuster There Will Ever Be”. It’s not “Chris Miller and Phil Lord Reflect on Directing Their Hit Project Hail Mary”. It’s not “Making a Faceless Alien Sing: Lord and Miller on the Impossible Challenges of Project Hail Mary”. It’s not “Inside Project Hail Mary: Process, Puppets, and the Messiness of Space”. It’s not “Turning Doom Into Hope: The Directors of ‘Project Hail Mary’ on Friendship, Science, and Survival”. It’s not From Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Project Hail Mary: Lord and Miller’s Obsession With Projects That Shouldn’t Work.

Instead, it’s:

Esther Zuckerman; What the ‘Project Hail Mary’ Directors Learned From a Firing <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/movies/project-hail-mary-phil-lord-christopher-miller.html>: ‘Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, best known for animations like the “Spider-Verse” films, took lessons from “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” a project from which they were dismissed…

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Huh!?!?

I have thoughts. But I find myself annoyed enough that it would probably be wise to put them below the fold, while I take some time to decide on whether they are properly reasoned or not. But I do feel I should note that there is a backstory here—a backstory here that might explain why the title and subhead of the article strike me as so really, really weird.

The New York Times gave the baton to review my cousin Phil Lord and the Team’s Project Hail Mary review to Manohla Dargis. She then set out maxxnegging it:...